FICTION

NOT WHERE I STARTED FROM: Stories by Kate Wheeler (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 239 pp.) The trick to the short story is to grab you all at once. Kate Wheeler, still young, is a master. A sampling: “A week into our affair, Severo Marquez told me that he had shot his own dog.” “It’s been two years since I left Pinyan Monastery, but every time my head itches I still think it’s that ringworm.” “When Mayland Thompson dies he wants to be buried with the body of a 12-year-old girl. ‘A fresh one,’ he says.” She nails you, Ms. Wheeler, every time out, and she never lets go, be it by lively, demotic dialogue; by images clear and bracing as glacier water; by irony and insight.

Wheeler’s sets, reflecting her own peripatetic life, range from Burma to Buenos Aires, Kansas to Colombia, but she never drifts. Hers are solid stories, stories that tangle the emotions, tweak the perspective. Who else can see trees illuminated from beneath and sense a violation of privacy, “as if the lights were being shone up their skirts”?